The Secretary of the Interior (secretario de Gobernación), Fernando Gómez Mont, pointed at the penal system in Chihuahua as being one of the main causes of the misgovernment that is lived there, and especially in Ciudad Juarez. While participating in a criminal justice forum organized by the Supreme Court, Gómez Mont took the state of Chihuahua, one of the first to implement the oral trail model, as an example of how a good justice model that is badly implemented can frustrate the expectations of society saying, “the conception of the criminal justice system in Chihuahua is one of the causal factors of misgovernment that is lived mainly in Ciudad Juarez.” In the case of Chihuahua he was cited by El Universal as saying Chihuahua is an example of “a justice system that is not containing, containing the violent… so that violence is not multiplied in the society.”
Prior to the closing of the forum, which analyzed the implementation of the reform that obligates that in the next six years a justice system based on oral judgments be established, Gómez Mont requested that they stop seeing prison as a place where delinquents can leave rehabilitated. He also said it was necessary to “accept an insurmountable truth: the criminal justice system in Mexico is not readjusting.” He said that the prisons face a grave problem because they maintain systems of self-governance and are even vulnerable to external aggression. Referring to the same topic, the Federal Prison System (Sistema Penitenciario Federal) undersecretary, José Patricio Patiño Arias, announced that there are 227,000 individuals currently imprisoned in the, while national capacity is of 172,000 prison spaces.
Source:
El Universal. “Sistema penal de Chihuahua, causa desgobierno: Segob.” El Universal. 22 Abril, 2010.
